The Just City

by Jo Walton

Series:

Thessaly #1

Publisher:

Tor

Copyright:

2014

Printing:

January 2015

ISBN:

0-7653-3266-3

Format:

Hardcover

Pages:

368

The premise for The Just City is easy to state: The time-traveling
goddess Athene (Athena) decides to organize and aid an attempt to create
the society described in Plato's Republic. She chooses Thera
(modern Santorini) before the eruption, as a safe place where this
experiment wouldn't alter history. The elders of the city are seeded by
people throughout history who at some point prayed to Athene, wanting to
live in the Republic. The children of the age of ten that Plato
suggested starting with are purchased as slaves from various points in
history and transported by Athene to the island.

Apollo, shaken and confused by Daphne wanting to turn into a tree rather
than sleep with him, finds out about this experiment as Athene tries to
explain the concept of consent to him. He decides that becoming human for
a while might help him learn about volition and equal significance, and
that this is the perfect location. He's one of the three viewpoint
characters. The others are two women: one (Maia) from Victorian times who
prayed to Athene in a moment of longing for the tentative sexual equality
of the Republic and was recruited as one of the elders, and another
(Simmea) who is bought as a slave and becomes one of the children.

I should admit up-front that I've never read Plato's Republic, or
indeed much of Plato at all, just small bits for classes. The elders (and
of course the gods) all have, and are attempting to stick quite closely to
Plato's outline of the ideal city. The children haven't, though, so the
book is quite readable for people like me who only remember a few vague
aspects of Plato's vision from school. The reader learns the principles
alongside Simmea.

One of Walton's strengths is taking a science fiction concept, putting
real people into it, and letting the quotidian mingle with the fantastic.
Simmea is my favorite character here: her journey to the city is deeply
traumatic, but the opportunity she gets there is incredible and unforeseen,
and she comes to love the city while still understanding, and arguing
about, its possible flaws. Maia is nearly as successful; Walton does a
good job with committee debates and discussions, avoids coming down too
heavily on the drama, and shows a believable picture of people with very
different backgrounds and beliefs coming together to flesh out the
outlines of something they all agree with, or at least want to try.

I found Apollo less engaging as a character, partly because I never quite
understood his motives or his weird failure to understand the principles
of consent. Walton doesn't portray him as either hopelessly arrogant or
hopelessly narcissistic, which would have been easy outs, but in avoiding
those two obvious explanations for his failures of empathy, I felt like
she left him with an odd and unexplained hole in his personality. He's a
weirdly passive half-character for much of the book, although he does
develop a bit more towards the end (which was probably the point).

Half the fun of this book is working out what the Republic would be like
in practice, and what breakdowns and compromises would happen as soon as
you put real people in it. Athene obviously has to do a bit of cheating
to make a utopia invented as an intellectual exercise work out in
practice, plus a bit more for comfort (electricity and indoor plumbing,
for instance). The most substantial cheat is robots to replace slaves and
do quite a bit that slaves couldn't. Birth control (something Plato
obviously never would have thought of) is another notable cheat; it's
postulated to be an ancient method since lost, but even if that existed,
there's no way it would be this reliable. But otherwise, the society
mostly works, and Walton shows enough of the arguing and mechanics to make
that believable, while still avoiding infodumps and boring descriptions.
It's neatly done, although I'm still a bit dubious that the elders from
later eras would have put up with the primitive conditions with this
little complaint.

The novel needs a plot, of course, and that's the other half of the fun.
I can't talk about this in any detail without spoiling the book, since the
plot only kicks in about halfway through once the setup and character
introductions are complete. That makes it hard to explain why I found
this a bit less successful, although parts of it are brilliant.

What worked for me is the growth of Simmea and her friends as students and
philosophers, the arguments and discussions (and their growing enthusiasm
for argument and discussion), and the way Greek mythology is woven subtly
and undramatically into the story. It really does feel like sitting in on
ancient Greek philosophical arguments and experiments, and by that measure
Walton has succeeded admirably in her goal.

What didn't work for me was the driving conflict of the story, once it's
introduced. I can't describe it without spoilers, but it's an old trope
in science fiction and one with little scientific basis. It may seem
weird to argue that point in a book with time-traveling Greek gods, a
literal Lethe, and a Greek idea of souls, but those are mythological
background material. The SF trope is something about which I have
personal expertise and which simply doesn't work that way, and I had a
harder time getting past that than alternate metaphysical properties. It
threw me out of the book a bit. I see why Walton chose the conflict she
did, but I felt like she could have gotten to the same place in the plot,
admittedly with more difficulty, by using some of the more dubious aspects
of Plato's long-term plan plus some other obstacles that were already
built into the world. This more direct approach added a bit of SF-style
analysis of the unknown that seemed weirdly at odds with the rest of the
story (even if the delight of one of the characters is endearing).

That complaint aside, I really enjoyed reading this book. Apollo didn't
entirely work for me, but all of the other characters are excellent, and
Walton keeps the story moving at a comfortable clip. Given the amount of
description required, particularly for an audience that may not have read
the Republic, a lesser writer could have easily slipped into the
infodump trap. Walton never does.

Fair warning, though: The Just City does end on a cliffhanger, and
is in no way a standalone novel. You will probably want to have the
sequel on hand.